On March 21, the largest known asteroid that flew past Earth in 2021 will carefully approach our planet.
The enormous space rock – known as 2001 FO32 – is one of many ‘near-Earth objects’, or NEOs, orbiting the sun in our cosmic environment.
This term refers to objects with orbits that can take it within 30 million miles of the Earth’s own orbit around the sun.
According to NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), about 25,000 NEOs have been identified so far. The vast majority are asteroids and a handful of comets.
More than 2,100 of these near-Earth objects are classified as ‘potentially dangerous’. But what does this term actually mean?
Potentially dangerous NEOs are those with orbits that approach the Earth’s own path around the sun to within 4.6 million miles, while also measuring greater than about 460 feet in diameter.
CNEOS director Paul Chodas said earlier Newsweek that objects are classified as potentially dangerous because they are in orbits that “come close enough to Earth that it is possible for many centuries and millennia to evolve in an orbit around the Earth. It is therefore wise to use these asteroids for decades. watching and studying how their orbits could develop. ‘
The asteroid 2001 FO32 meets both of these criteria. The CNEOS, based on NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, estimates that it measures 2526 feet (0.57 miles) and 5,577 feet (1.05 miles) in diameter.
On March 21, the rock will come within about 11:03 ET within about 1.3 million miles of our planet.
NASA has several asteroid search programs that scan the sky every night. Once objects are discovered near Earth, astronomers monitor them to understand their orbits and determine the chances of hitting our planet.
Astronomers have already identified more than 95 percent of the truly large asteroids – which are 1 kilometer or more in diameter – and according to Chodas, none of them have a significant chance of colliding with Earth.
As it flies past the Earth, FO32 will move at a staggering velocity relative to the Earth during its close approach – about 76,980 miles per hour.
It is about 100 times faster than the speed of sound and about a third as fast as a lightning bolt when it moves from the atmosphere to the ground. The asteroid is the fastest travel rock to fly past the earth this year.
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